Just something whacky to get you thinking. At least it got me pulling apart my hair, and now, I'm half bald.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Bumping up the bandwidth usage.

Have you ever wondered how you can (without too much of effort) use a lot of bandwidth on your local LAN? Well, if you have a central proxy server(gateway machine) through which you connect to the internet or to other computers, then you could do this quite easily.

First of all, configure your browser to use the proxy server installed. Then change the settings so that the browser uses the proxy server even for localhost(your local machine). The browser defaults general bypass the proxy for localhost. On your machine, on port 80, configure a proxy server(squid) to use the proxy server on the gateway machine for making connections.

Now, type your machine's IP address on your browser's address bar, and hit enter, and watch while the packets keep bouncing to and fro the gateway machine and your machine. This happens because your browser will contact the proxy server for the request, which in turn will contact your machine, which will again contact the proxy at the gateway, and so on....